A few words from a professional procrastinator

Is Heavy Rain the future of entertainment?

How will we get our entertainment in the future? Will it be sent directly to our heads via helmets that allow us to see, feel and hear things? Will it be as Star Trek envisioned in the form of the holodeck where we literally experience virtual reality of a world of our own choosing. These are all great ideas but we’re not exactly there yet.

For now, Heavy Rain will try to steer us into that direction.

It’s hard to classify a game like Heavy Rain. It’s adventure game but it’s more like an RPG. But there’s more backstory than your usual RPG. So what is Heavy Rain?

French Studio, Quantic Dream brings together an adventure you are on the hunt for a serial killer. You sit in the role of four protagonists, each with their own reason for hunting down the “Origami Killer”.

My initial impressions. Moving is a bit clunky. It reminds me on why I don’t play any of the Resident Evil games. Getting used to the controls takes time. Be sure to set your screen gamma correctly or else you’ll be wandering around in the dark, frustated that you can’t see anything. Oh and you’ll be using the sixaxis control quite often. Don’t worry, it’s one of the better uses of the technology in a long time.

But I never thought of pressing sequential buttons be very stressful and exciting. It reminds me of that part in Brain Age where you have to say the name of the color of the text and not the text. It affects that part of the brain. The mystery surrounding the Origami Killer has that Silence of the Lambs atmosphere. Even the music is almost the same.

The demo doesn’t show much other than learning the dialogue trees and the controls but it doesn’t say much about the story other than a string of murders.